Wednesday, August 22, 2012

MWDL Collaborates with Digital Public Library of America

The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) has been selected as one of the first seven state/regional digital collaborative programs to be included in the launch of the Digital Public Library of America. MWDL will be participating in a Digital Hubs Pilot project starting September 2012, designed as the first step in connecting the various content repositories of the United States into a distributed content infrastructure that will support local digital content creation, description, and preservation, as well as provide an on-ramp for libraries, archives, and museums to share their content with the new national library.

MWDL was selected, according to the grant, because of "experience in maintaining a successful regional collaborative," "the maturity of their service offering," "their deep staff expertise," and "the size and diversity of format types in their existing collections." It is is the sole regional hub in the Pilot. There are six state hubs, including Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Oregon.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious project intended to make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all. Over the last two years, the DPLA has created a broad community that is working together towards this common purpose, with representation from public libraries, academic libraries, archives, and museums. The DPLA's new portal will launch in April 2013 with open content from the digital hubs in this pilot, as well as from very large content providers like HathiTrust and the Internet Archive. The Pilot project, in the words of the NEH proposal, aims to "bring together the existing U.S. digital library infrastructure into a sustainable national digital library system."

DPLA has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the Digital Hubs Pilot over the next two years. To facilitate the partnership in the Mountain West, the MWDL will receive approximately $125,000, primarily for creating the connection for metadata harvesting into DPLA and for working with collection partners on metadata issues and appropriate rights declarations.